Sunday, July 01, 2007

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

A witness to the attack said on BBC television that one of the car’s occupants had been ablaze from head to foot, and as he struggled with the police, “was throwing punches and shouting ‘Allah, Allah.’ ”

We shouldn’t read too much in to this; the guy was on fire, after all. He could well have just been screaming, “AAAHHH! AAAHHH!” like a common Presbyterian. The article, from the NYT, continues:

In July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transit system, and another set of attacks failed two weeks later, bringing home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population. Witnesses said the two men in the Glasgow attack were South Asian.

The 2005 bombers weren’t “disenfranchised”. Dismantled, yes, after their suicide attacks; but franchise-wise, they were enfranchised right up to the level of Mercedes-Benz ownership. Speaking of which:

The alert began early Friday, when the two cars, Mercedes sedans, were found in the central West End theater and nightclub district ...

Sajjan M. Gohel, a security expert, said the police were pursuing a theory that the two car bombs had been designed to explode one after the other — the first to bring people into the street and the second to cause great loss of life. The fact that Thursday night at Tiger Tiger was ladies’ night, he said, recalled a conspiracy in 2004 in which British-born bombers said they wanted to attack women at a nightclub, whom they viewed as promiscuous, in conversations monitored by British intelligence.

And there’s this:

Saturday was the first full day of the school summer vacations; thousands of people were awaiting flights in Glasgow.

When it comes to mass murder, these chaps follow the old seafaring notion: women and children first. Scots weren’t about to stand for any Jeepish airport antics, according to witness Lynsey McBean:

“We saw a green Cherokee drive straight into the front door of the airport but it got jammed. They were obviously trying to get it farther inside the airport as the wheels were spinning and smoke was coming from them. One of the men, I think it was the driver, brought out a plastic petrol canister and poured it under the car. He then set light to it.

“At that point a policeman came over, the passenger got out of the car and punched him. At that point I began to run away. But when I looked back several people had run over to try and stop the men.”

Thus a difference between cultures is made clear. Now unburdened by office, Tony Blair makes a few points:

Tony Blair has launched a powerful attack on ‘absurd’ British Islamists who have nurtured a false ‘sense of grievance’ that they are being oppressed by Britain and the United States ...

‘The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we’re not actually fighting it properly. We’re not actually standing up to these people and saying, “It’s not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn’t justified."’

The next editor of Webster’s might like to include a new New York Times definition of “disenfranchised”: “complacent liberal assumption designed to reassure readers that they can fit this story into all the old cliches about the usual root causes”.